Protecting a signal from corruption is a significant problem for data transmission systems. In particular, noise is a major factor in corrupting data signals. In wireless telephone systems such as cordless phones or cellular phones, particular problems include fading (e.g. multipath fading) and white noise. A challenge in dealing with noise is that these sources produce different error patterns. For example, white noise tends to result in single bit errors randomly scattered. On the other hand, in a fading channel, errors will more often come in bursts. Digital error detection and correction techniques can mitigate many of these errors. However, it is hard to protect against both random and bursty errors. At the same time, in many cordless phone systems, not all of the available bandwidth is actually used. Therefore, it would be useful to have a way to mitigate transmission errors while also taking full advantage of the available transmission resources.